You'll never be an astronaut now.

Sorry, didnt see your above post johnboy.

Don’t forget about private industry. NASA isn’t the end, just the beginning.

Space X has put out a media release saying they’d one day like to take a person up to low earth orbit and back again.

RiotACT could put out a media release just as easily, although I grant SpaceX is further along the way to actually doing it.

Gungahlin Al said :

oddball508 said :

Space flight is going civilian now. NASA is plannig to outsouce a lot of the delivery missions.

Yes but they’ll mostly be robotic flights for cargo deliveries – people just aren’t really needed any more. The people movements will be via the Soyuz. Shame.

Correction – Space X is apparently also able to transport people. This infographic explains it all pretty well – including the massive loss of payload capacity with the shuttles mothballed: http://dvice.com/archives/2011/07/image-of-the-da-220.php

http://www.lechatnoirboutique.com/proddetail.php?prod=FSRS

Press releases are cheap, interplanetary rockets less so.

“Our destinations for humans beyond Earth remain ambitious. They include: the moon, asteroids, and Mars. The debate is not if we will explore, but how we’ll do it.”
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden Jul 1 2011

Hmmm maybe I don’t have to dash the hopes of my 5 year old quite yet.

Good pickup Sigma. The gaps are because this is really three images stiched together. Each exposure was 30 seconds. Longer than that and the glow from Canberra takes over the image. While some people would fill in the gaps, I don’t do that.
It is true that the ISS will make another good pass on the 19th, but that may be just after the return to earth of Atlantis. This is a 12 day mission and I believe the shuttle will have separated from the ISS by then and will not pass over us. This is what the current data from the NASA Human Flight web site is telling me.

It’s only temporary. Start training your kids.

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?genre_id=131

surely this will leave the global job market with a surplus of rocket scientists. Would this then allow brain surgeons to sit alone atop the pile of “complex” jobs – will “it’s not rocket science” thus be condemned to the scrapheap (much as NASA is)?